BigQuery vs Heap

Storage is billed separately from compute. Compute is either on-demand, priced by the bytes a query reads from the referenced columns, or capacity-based, where you reserve autoscaling slots. Most cost surprises come from on-demand queries that scan more than expected.

Heap's autocapture is a single code snippet that automatically captures every click, swipe, tap, pageview, and form fill on your website and apps without requiring manual event setup. Once installed, Heap captures the entire digital experience of every user on every platform with no ongoing engineering maintenance needed.

Partition and cluster tables so queries prune data, select only the columns needed, use materialised views for repeated aggregations, and set maximum bytes billed on queries so a runaway scan fails instead of billing.

Heap offers a Free plan for up to 10,000 monthly sessions. Growth, Pro, and Premier plans use custom session-based pricing that requires contacting sales for a quote. Free includes basic charts and 6 months data history. Growth adds the Sense AI assistant. Pro adds account analytics. Premier adds data warehouse integration and dedicated customer success management.

The service only runs on Google Cloud. BigQuery Omni can query data held in S3 or Azure storage, but the compute is still Google's and the account relationship is still with Google.

Heap includes integrated session replay showing exactly what users did on your site. However, Heap does not include built-in A/B testing or feature flags. Teams requiring these capabilities must use separate tools or integrate with third-party platforms.

No. Latency for single-row reads is far too high. BigQuery is an analytical warehouse and application read paths need a transactional database or a cache in front of it.

Heap supports over 100 integrations connecting to business tools including marketing platforms, CRMs, and data warehouses. This allows insights to reach relevant teams and ensures data flows to other business systems automatically.

When on-demand spend becomes both large and predictable, or when unpredictable spend is a bigger problem than query queueing. The switch trades a variable bill for a fixed one plus contention between workloads.

Heap is cloud-only and does not offer self-hosted options. Organizations requiring on-premises deployment should consider alternatives like PostHog which supports self-hosting alongside its cloud product.

Sense Chat is Heap's AI assistant that enables users to access analytics without extensive technical knowledge. It allows teams to ask questions about user behavior and get answers directly without lengthy onboarding or technical expertise, making insights more accessible to non-technical stakeholders.